Atom Egoyan recently won the Dan David Prize. Each year a foundation in Tel Aviv gives out three prizes, for achievements related to the past, the present, and the future. This year the $1 million prize related to the past is for “creative rendering of the past,” and it was split among filmmaker Egoyan, novelist Amos Oz, and playwright Tom Stoppard. Egoyan was cited for his exploration of Armenian history and culture in several films, especially Ararat (the DVD can be borrowed from Media Commons).

Egoyan is currently at U of T as the Distinguished Visitor in Theatre, Film, Music and Visual Studies. The students who run Diablo’s café were so excited when Egoyan became a customer that they put a quarter he’d spent there on permanent display.

Laidlaw Library has nine of the twelve books shortlisted for Canada and the Caribbean, and I’ve just ordered the other three. The lone Caribbean title on the shortlist, The Rainmaker’s Mistake by Jamaican novelist Erna Brodber, seems to be hard to find in Canada (perhaps that will change now that it’s been shortlisted!). But it’s available from the publisher, New Beacon Books, in England.

I just finished Michael Redhill’s absorbing novel Consolation, which is set in Toronto in the 1850s and 1990s.Redhill is a U.C. grad (I heard him read at the Celebrate U.C. authors event a couple of years ago).

The Toronto Public Library is encouraging all Torontonians to read Consolation this month. It’s Toronto’s first annual “community read,” but many cities have had such “One Book” events since they were invented in 1998 by the head of Seattle’s public libraries, Nancy Pearl (who’s since been immortalized in a Librarian Action Figure!).

TPL has bought over 2,000 copies of the novel. I went to their “Kick-Off” evening on Monday and heard Redhill talk about how he was inspired to write the novel by certain real-life events and by photographs in the book Lost Toronto.There’s more info on the TPL’s One Book website and on Michael Redhill’s blog.